People with a particular gene variant performed more than 20% worse on a driving test than people without it - and a follow-up test a few days later yielded similar results. About 30 percent of Americans have the variant. This gene variant limits the availability of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor during activity. BDNF keeps memory strong by supporting communication among brain cells and keeping them functioning optimally. When a person is engaged in a particular task, BDNF is secreted in the brain area connected with that activity to help the body respond. Previous studies have shown that in people with the variant, a smaller portion of the brain is stimulated when doing a task than in those with a normal BDNF gene. People with the variant also don't recover as well after a stroke. The gene variant isn't always bad, though. Studies have found that people with it maintain their usual mental sharpness longer than those without it when neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's, Huntington's and multiple sclerosis are present.

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Researchers have discovered that the majority of people living in countries considered to be collectivist have a certain mutation within a gene that regulates the transport of serotonin, a neurochemical known to have a substantial affect on mood. For example, in China and other east Asian nations, up to 80% of the population carry this so-called "short" allele, or variant, of a stretch of DNA known as 5-HTTLPR. Previous research had revealed that the S allele is greatly connected to a variety of negative emotions, such as anxiety and depression. What is even more serious is its association with the impulse to protect oneself and avoid harm. On the flip side, in countries of European origin that tend toward self-expression and individuality over group goals, the long or "L" allele dominates, with only 40% of people carrying the "S" variant. Scientists believe that cultures exposed to high levels of deadly pathogens, such as ancient cultures in Asia, Africa and Latin America might have leaned more toward collectivist norms in order to stave off disease. Such a social transformation would have then favored the gradual dominance of the risk-avoidance S allele.

Monday, October 26, 2009

In a study of 11,000 pairs of twins from four countries, scientists have found that the heritability of IQ increases linearly from childhood (about 40%) to adolescence (about 55%) to young adulthood (about 65%).

By the time they are toddlers, Latino children trail their white counterparts by up to six months in understanding words, speaking in more complex sentences and performing such simple tasks as assembling puzzles. The findings from researchers at UC Berkeley, UCLA and the University of Pittsburgh are based on a nationwide tracking study of more than 8,000 children born in 2001 and are being published in the Maternal and Child Health Journal and the medical journal Pediatrics. Past studies have documented disparities between Latino children and their white peers in kindergarten and persistent achievement gaps in later grades. The new findings pinpoint the beginnings of those gaps at an earlier age than previously thought. "Cognitive skills and language during toddler years are a strong predictor of who will do well in kindergarten and early elementary grades," said study co-author Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at UC Berkeley.

Saturday, October 24, 2009

Heather Mac Donald has some advice that immigration activists should listen to:

Instruct illegals to scrupulously obey the domestic laws so as not to come to the attention of the police. But such advice never issues from La Raza or the phalanx of immigration attorneys who howl at every deportation of an illegal criminal.

The program, made by Lebanese satellite network LBC, caused a huge scandal in conservative Saudi Arabia when it was shown. The journalist is one of two female LBC employees who have been arrested. Mazen Abdul Jawad, the Saudi man who talked about how he picked up Saudi women for sex, has already been jailed. Mazen Abdul Jawad provoked outrage by describing his techniques for meeting and having sex with Saudi women. He tearfully apologised but was jailed for five years and sentenced to 1,000 lashes. Three of his friends who appeared on the show got two years each.

Local police said the victims were Muslim widows who had been labelled as witches by a local cleric. The incident occurred in a remote village in Deoghar district. The abuse of women who are branded as witches is common, but rare footage of the incident has caused outrage across India. Police went to Pattharghatia village after being informed about the incident by a group of villagers. Police say that people in Pattharghatia believe that certain women in their village are possessed by a "holy spirit" that can identify those who practise witchcraft. Hundreds of people, mostly women, have been killed in India because their neighbors thought they were witches.

Plants can't see or hear, but they can recognize their siblings, and now researchers have found out how: They use chemical signals secreted from their roots, according to a new study. Back in 2007, Canadian researchers discovered that a common seashore plant, called a sea rocket, can recognize its siblings — plants grown from seeds from the same plant, or mother. They saw that when siblings are grown next to each other in the soil, they "play nice" and don't send out more roots to compete with one another. But as soon as one of the plants is thrown in with strangers, it begins competing with them by rapidly growing more roots to take up the water and mineral nutrients in the soil. The length of the longest lateral root and of the hypocotyl, the first leaf-like structure that forms on the plant, were measured. A lateral root is a root that extends horizontally outward from the primary root, which grows downward. Plants exposed to strangers had greater lateral root formation than the plants that were exposed to siblings. Further, when sibling plants grow next to each other, their leaves will often touch and intertwine, while stranger plants near each other grow rigidly upright and avoid touching, the authors say.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Rape has turned into a weapon of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with the number of attacks on women having grown threefold over the past few years, human rights activists have said. Anneke van Woudenberg, senior researcher with Human Rights Watch, said that 200,000 women and girls have been raped in Eastern Congo since 1998, and the condition of women has become more dire as the Congolese army has pressed a military campaign against armed groups in the countryside. "Rape is being used as a weapon of war in eastern Congo. So we notice and we have documented that when armed groups walk into town, they will rape the women and girls, sometimes publicly, sometimes privately, in order to punish the local population," she said. "It's the easiest way to terrorize a community."

Scientists have found evidence of recent natural selection in Europeans:

By comparing human data with genetic data from chimpanzees, the team were able to conclude that the genetic variant was the result of a selection event favouring variants that increase the risk of heart disease, coeliac disease and type 1 diabetes in European populations 3,400 years ago. The authors suggest that the risk factors were positively selected for because they gave carriers an increased protection against infection.

Online dating site data shows that people are racially-biased when it comes to picking a date:

White men get more responses. Whatever it is, white males just get more replies from almost every group. We were careful to preselect our data pool so that physical attractiveness (as measured by our site picture-rating utility) was roughly even across all the race/gender slices. For guys, we did likewise with height.

White women prefer white men to the exclusion of everyone else—and Asian and Hispanic women prefer them even more exclusively. These three types of women only respond well to white men. More significantly, these groups’ reply rates to non-whites is terrible. Asian women write back non-white males at 21.9%, Hispanic women at 22.9%, and white women at 23.0%. It’s here where things get interesting, for white women in particular. If you look at the match-by-race table before this one, the “should-look-like” one, you see that white women have an above-average compatibility with almost every group. Yet they only reply well to guys who look like them.

Article points out that African countries such as Tanzania and South Africa have low IQ rates:

For one thing, the results are skewed by a relatively small number of countries with high rates of spanking and especially low average IQs, particularly Tanzania and South Africa -- where about a third of university students reported being spanked a lot before age 12, and where average IQ rates stood at 72. Excluding these countries, "the line would be much closer to flat, indicating little or no relationship," says Dr. Mundfrom.

Attributing cognitive problems in children to spanking is hard enough. But then saying it is a major reason behind the lower IQ of a nation's entire population is even trickier because there could be a new raft of potential causes.

Martin Wells, a statistician at Cornell University, re-ran the statistical test to check whether regional variations in IQ -- which is lower in Latin America and Africa -- could account for the IQ differences Prof. Straus found. After accounting for regional variations, Dr. Wells found the effect of spanking vanished.

The latest scores were especially disappointing because score gaps between white and minority students did not diminish at all since the last time the math test was administered, in 2007. On average, the nation’s fourth graders scored 240 on a 500-point scale, just as they did in 2007. White fourth graders, on average, scored 248, Hispanics scored 227 and blacks scored 222. Eighth graders, on average, scored 283 on the same scale, up from 281 in 2007. White eighth graders, on average, scored 293, while Hispanics scored 266 and black eighth graders scored 261. The gap of 32 points separating average black and white eighth graders represents about three years’ worth of math learning.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

DNA tests on British populations of small mammals show a genetically distinct Celtic Fringe, say scientists at The University of York. Voles, shrews, mice and stoats in northern and western areas have different DNA from their counterparts in other parts of the British Isles. The paper says the different populations arrived at the end of the last ice age. The authors say the work sheds light on the origins of the Celtic people. The traditional view is that the ancestors of British Celts spread from central Europe during the Iron Age and were later displaced by the arrival of the Anglo Saxons. However, recent genetic studies have challenged this theory, suggesting a much earlier origin, dating back to the end of the last ice age, 19,000 years ago.

It is said that overly macho males suffer from too much testosterone, but a new study in mice reveals how estrogen might share in that blame. The report reveals how early estrogen exposure masculinizes the brain circuitry, predisposing boys to be boys as it were. That early event is specifically critical in producing male mice that will pick fights with other males and that dutifully mark their territories with urine. "It's been known for decades that estrogen may play a role in making males behave like males," said Nirao Shah of the University of California, San Francisco. "What we do here is to provide insight into the logic of how estrogen regulates that behavior." The basis for differences between the sexes in such behaviors, they show, may reside in the neurons that are equipped with an enzyme, called aromatase, that converts testosterone into estrogen. The masculine brain has more of those testosterone-converting neurons in certain regions. The researchers now show that these neurons establish a unique neural circuitry in males, and that this difference in wiring depends on estrogen. The researchers found that female mice exposed to estrogen as pups get wired to behave as tomboys of a sort. Their aromatase neurons now look like what is seen in the male brain, and the female mice take on aggressive and territorial behaviors typically reserved for males. But if estrogen, the female hormone, establishes male behavior patterns, why don't girls act like boys? Shah explains that the ovaries normally don't pump out any hormone that early in life, but males do see a surge in testosterone at a young age, at least some of which gets converted by aromatase to estrogen. The findings indicate that adult gonadal hormones are not the entire story when it comes to determining masculine versus feminine behavior, Shah said. "Rather than the gonadal hormones telling the adult brain what do to, the brain interprets signals based on its prior history," he said. Thus, female mice exposed to estrogen as pups respond to estrogen as adults by switching on the aggressive and territorial behaviors typically observed in males. Testosterone itself isn't off the hook yet, however. Shah's team suspects it is also likely to have direct effects. As evidence of that, Shah notes that female mice whose brains are masculinized by exposure to estrogen in early development do fight, but they tend to fight with less intensity than males. But when these females have their ovaries - their adulthood source of estrogen - removed and are treated with male levels of testosterone, their will to fight goes up. "It suggests testosterone acts on its own receptor to increase the intensity of male-like fighting," Shah said.

Monday, October 5, 2009

Britain has been ranked the 21st best place in the world to live – flagging behind Ireland and Iceland. The UN list, which saw Norway retain its status as the world’s most desirable place to live, ranks sub-Saharan African states afflicted by war and HIV/AIDS as the worst. Data collected prior to the global economic crisis showed people in Norway, Australia and Iceland had the best living standards, while Niger, Afghanistan and Sierra Leone scored worst in terms of human development. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) index was compiled using 2007 data on GDP per capita, education, and life expectancy, and showed marked differences between the developed and developing world. Life expectancy in Niger was 50, about 30 years shorter than Norway, according to the index. For every dollar earned per person in Niger, $85 was earned in Norway. People were poorest in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where average income per person was $298 per year.

The NYC Correction Department rabbi who resigned after it was revealed he organized a bar-mitzvah bash for an inmate's son behind bars recently has been parking illegally while displaying a placard that falsely claims he is a firefighter. Rabbi Leib Glanz was spotted using an official Uniformed Firefighters Association placard Friday while praying in a Williamsburg synagogue. The politically connected rabbi had organized a bar mitzvah for the son of notorious fraudster and longtime fugitive Tuvia Stern in the downtown Manhattan jail known as The Tombs. The soiree had dozens of non-inmates as guests, featured catered kosher food and a live performance by popular Orthodox Jewish singer Yaakov Shwekey. Several former inmates soon afterward said Glanz for years had arranged for Jewish inmates to be housed at The Tombs, where he let them use his office to watch movies, make phone calls and nosh on kosher delicacies. The exposé sparked a still-pending Department of Investigation probe into Correction's coddling of Jewish inmates, as well as the resignations of Glanz and Correction chief Peter Curcio, who didn't stop the rabbi's flouting of jailhouse policy.

Vacant, lender-owned foreclosed properties in Chicago are concentrated in African-American communities, where they go unsold longer and incur greater losses to the lender than such properties in white communities, according to a report by the Woodstock Institute. Sixty percent of such properties from 2007 and the first half of 2008 were in black communities, and the properties took 25% longer to be absorbed into the market than such properties in predominantly white areas, the report found. When the properties were sold, the average loss per property to the lender was 35% in black communities. That compared with an average loss of 17% in white communities. The longer a property remains vacant, the longer the community is exposed to the negative effects of vacant properties, including declining property values of surrounding homes and increases in crime, according to the institute.

A recent study published in the October 2009 issue of the Journal of Thoracic Oncology determined that variations of specific genetic markers identified in previous research, or SNPs, may indicate a greater lung cancer risk in African Americans than in whites. The genes CHRNA3 and CHRNA5 may contribute to lung cancer risk due directly or through their association with nicotine dependence. Although their presence is less frequent in African Americans, the risk for lung cancer may be greater when present. Despite reporting lower levels of smoking, lung cancer incidence remains higher for African Americans, than for whites, so this is an important population in which to study the role of CHRNA3 and CHRNA5 genes and risk of lung cancer. The present study concentrated on the genes CHRNA3 and CHRNA5, confirming a stronger association with the risk of lung cancer than with nicotine dependence in African Americans.

A court sentenced them to death for attacking the boy and severing his legs for use in witchdoctors' potions. There are more than 100 people on death row, but no-one has been executed in more than 15 years. But TAS chairman Ernest Kimaya urged the president to endorse the sentence. Kimaya told Tanzania's Citizen newspaper that a public execution would also "show that the government is serious in its war on albino killers". In the past two years, 53 albino people have been murdered in Tanzania. Albino people, who lack pigment in their skin and appear pale, are killed because potions made from their body parts are believed to bring good luck and wealth. The Tanzanian government has publicly stated its desire to end the killings. Officials banned witchdoctors from practising, however many have continued to work. Many of Tanzania's estimated 17,000 albino people are now living in fear, especially in villages in the north-west where the majority of the murders have occurred. The case in Kahama was the first conviction in Tanzania for an albino killing. There is also a fear of reprisal killings as witchdoctors and their clients wield a lot of power in their communities. Witchdoctors in Tanzania and other parts of East Africa have made tens of thousands of dollars from selling potions and other items made from the bones, hair, skin and genitals of dead albino people. They pay a lot of money for body parts. In July 2009 a court in neighbouring Burundi sentenced one person to life in prison and eight others to jail for the murder of albino people whose remains were sold in Tanzania.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

While the murder rate has fallen by 3%, this still represent more than 18,000 killings per year and is one of the highest rates in the world. Sexual offenses have risen by 10%, which the government partly attributes to the inclusion of attacks on men. Opposition parties have criticized the government's record on crime. Nationwide, some 2.1m serious crimes were recorded in the past year.

Children who eat sweets and chocolate every day are more likely to be violent as adults, according to British researchers. The Cardiff University study involving 17,500 people is the first into effects of childhood diet on adult violence. It found 10-year-olds who ate sweets daily were significantly more likely to have a violence conviction by age 34. The researchers looked at data on around 17,500 people and found that 69% of the participants who were violent at the age of 34 had eaten sweets and chocolate nearly every day during childhood, compared to 42% who were non-violent.